Thursday, 11 October 2012

I love generic fantasy miniatures,
especially evil ones; they are just so versatile. Take this guy,
for example. I would have no qualms about using him as an adversary to my Greek Heroes, my Warhammer 40K
Inquisitors, or my Dwarf adventurers. Heck, he wouldn’t even look too out of
place, rising up to threaten my Confederates.

This
guy comes from Reaper, and I think I picked him up at the Orc’s Nest in
London. He was exceptionally easy to
paint, just a base coat and a whole lot of dry brushing.

It's a real delight when so little work, returns such a nice looking figure.

Wednesday, 10 October 2012

Confined, both morning and afternoon, to the bus, by my still mending shoulder, I do
my best to pass these wearisome rides with a bit of enjoyable literature. My current book of choice is Hard Times, the
shortest, which is not to say short, novel by Charles Dickens. Previously, my acquaintance with this man of
letters has been brief: a couple of readings of A Christmas Carol, which I
thoroughly enjoyed, and a force-feed helping of Great Expectations, which I
most certainly did not. After a week of
bumpy rides, I am halfway through the book, and, despite its somewhat wandering
plot, I am enjoying it. Dickens had such
an uncommon gift with words that it is easy to see why his works have survived, while most of his contemporaries have been forgotten (like so many of the words
that Dickens uses!).

There is one
sentence in particular that I thought proved a great example for the joys
and trials of reading Dickens, which I thought I might share with you all now.

‘In the hardest working part of Coketown; in
the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly
bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the
labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which
had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one
man’s purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering and trampling,
and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of this great exhausted
receiver, where the chimneys, for want of air to make a draught, were built in
an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out
a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it; among the
multitude of Coketown, generically called ‘the Hands,’ – a race who would have
found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them
only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and
stomachs – lived a certain Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age.’

Wow. I have no doubt that some literary critics
could write an entire essay just on that one sentence. Personally, I have just a few points to make.
The first reaction by most modern readers will almost certainly be to the sentence’s
extraordinary length. Although I’ve seen
longer (thank you James Fenimore Cooper), it is still an impressive work,
containing, as it does: 17 commas, 4 semi-colons, and 2 dashes. I have little doubt that any student who
tried to turn in such a sentence in an essay or school paper would draw the ire of the
red-pen and be told-off for using a ‘run-on sentence’. Certainly such writing is no longer in vogue,
in fact, his use semi-colons is most curious.
I remember a brief note from school that a semi-colon can be used in
place of a comma, where the use of a comma might cause confusion, but I only
ever saw this applied to lists, and never in fiction.

Leaving length and punctuation aside, it is a tremendous sentence. In
the first half, he paints a portrait of a horrible mill town in such
imaginative strokes, that I almost felt myself choking on the smoke pouring out
of the mill chimneys, while the ugly brick walls closed around me. In fact, I got so caught up in this
description, that when halfway through the sentence, he makes a grim joke about
the population, I was momentarily lost. Upon further reading, I believe the whole sentence is really one grim joke. He goes on for line after line, clause after
clause, about the town, before, finally, introducing an important character,
with only a single, semi-useful fact.
Stephen Blackpool is forty. He might have well have said that Stephen Blackpool is grist in the mill, except that he's writing about woolen mills.

Well, that’s thirteen sentences I just spent, talking about one by Charles Dickens. I suppose that says something pretty
important right there.

Friday, 5 October 2012

Over the
last few months, I have been reading a lot of Ancient Greek Myth, so it is not
terribly surprising that I got a hankering to paint up some Greek heroes. I spent several weeks researching the various
miniatures available and deciding exactly what I wanted. Since my love of Greek myth mostly comes from the old
Hollywood flicks, Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, I am
more interested in recreating the look of these films than I am in historical
accuracy. Thus, I decided I would base
my heroes on Greek hoplites, even though these warriors actually date to many
hundreds of years after the Heroic Age of Greece.

Phassos the cunning

After much
searching, I finally decided to go with the Greek hoplites put out by Wargames
Factory. I have had my differences with WF
in the past, but these figures ticked a lot of boxes. They have nice details, most of
which are pretty crisp. Since the arms,
heads, and weapons are all separate, there is room for a lot of variation among
the figures. Also, unlike hoplite figures
from most other companies, these figures are easy to assemble in heroic action
poses.

My only real
complaint about the set is the lack of head variation. There are only three different head types in
the box, and all of them have helmets.
Then again, I want most of my figures to be wearing helmets and I found
some suitable no-helmeted head replacements in my bits box, so I guess it wasn’t
that big a deal.

Cepheus

As I was
painting the figures, I thought about their story. What brought these guys together, and for
what do they fight? I like my heroes to
be just that – the good guys, but I needed a higher purpose, something that
could hold them together and give them direction. Well, in Greek Myth pretty much everything
revolves around the will of the gods, and of these immortals, there is only one
that strikes me as generally being good: Athena. As the goddess of wisdom and war, Athena is
the perfect patron for a group of wandering heroes. Thus I named my heroes ‘The Warriors of
Athena’ because they travel the world at her prompting, fighting monsters,
defending the weak, and generally doing all of that A-Team/Magnificent Seven
type stuff.

I’m not sure
if this is the final team line-up. I
suspect it may change over time as I paint up new figures and retire old
ones. I’d like to add a centaur to the
mix and maybe a warrior woman. I also plan to
get an Athena figure at some point for those times where the goddess decides to
directly intervene.

Now that I’ve got my team together, all I need is some baddies for them to fight!

Tuesday, 2 October 2012

Before I
became the proud owner of a stove with a non-functioning ignition switch, I
never gave a lot of thought to the topic of matches. However, over the last year of cooking, I’ve
discovered that not all matches are created equal.

When I first
started using matches, I bought long-stemmed cooking matches, because that is
what was on the shelf at the grocery store.
However, it soon occurred to me that I might be way over paying for these
‘fancy’ matches. Instead, I started
buying matches from my local shop and newsagents, who stock them mainly for
smokers. These little boxes cost about
1/6 to 1/8 of the price of cooking matches.
True, they are much shorter stems, but they are still long enough to
light several eyes on the stove.

There are
two brands of matches that seemed to be carried in the shops around here:
England’s Glory and Ship. For several
months, I used England’s Glory, but after picking up my first box of Ship, I
think I’m a convert. Ship matches are
about £0.10 more per box, for an equivalent number of matches. What makes them so much better is how much
easier they ignite. With England’s
Glory, I often had to strike the box a couple of times to ignite the match, and
occasionally broke off the match head.
Also, by the time I was down to the last couple of matches in the box, I’d
pretty much worn out the rough strip on the side of the box. Ship matches on the other hand, ignite with
only the gentlest pressure. Also the box
has strips running on both sides, encase one wears out.

According to
the boxes, both matches are manufactured in Sweden, though England’s Glory gives a UK
address in High Wycombe (pronounced ‘whickem’) , just down the road in Buckinghamshire.

While
England’s Glory is slightly cheaper, and comes in a more attractive little box,
it is not enough to make up for the much better quality of Ship.